Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 11, 1991 TAG: 9104110567
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLYDE HABERMAN/ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: ISIKVEREN, TURKEY LENGTH: Long
A woman awakened Wednesday on a mountain ridge above this meager village and discovered that six young children had died during the night in just the scattering of tents around her.
She watched the families bury their tiny bodies in a patch that has become a distressingly expanding cemetery. Then, she wept.
"That is how they will eradicate us, piece by piece," said Ahmad Ali, an engineer from the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk. "Yesterday, maybe it was six dead, the day before three, tomorrow five."
"It grows," he said. "Maybe after a week or 10 days, we will all be dead."
Ten days have passed since the Kurdish exodus from Iraq began reaching biblical dimensions. Yet rescue operations, at least in this stretch of mountainous border where 100,000 or more Kurds have sought sanctuary, have yet to be translated into anything more concrete than a chaos of promises and intentions.
There is a Turkish relief effort, bolstered by overseas contributions and aimed at hundreds of thousands of refugees massed at several entry points along the 206-mile frontier between Turkey and Iraq.
American, British and French cargo planes have augmented that aid for the past four days by dropping bundles of emergency supplies to Kurds on both sides of the border.
But at this remote outpost, up steep paths of thick mud inaccessible to most trucks, it is hard to see a pattern to the haphazard distribution of what thus far have been meager food and water supplies. And any internal organization by the Kurds seems non-existent.
"The snow is our water," a woman said. She and other refugees scoop up the snow that streaks the mountain's upper reaches, and boil it or simply let it melt.
As for food, sometimes there is bread or potatoes, but far more often not. The more provident among the Iraqis hauled flour with them to make a doughy bread, but those supplies are disappearing.
Before long, the snow will also be gone. While that is good in one sense because it means that days will not be so cold, it also threatens to eradicate the principal water source unless alternatives are provided soon.
The on-scene chief of the Turkish Red Crescent Society, working at the base of the main mountain road, said he had yet to visit the top, three or four miles up. He also did not know, he said, how many physicians were there, if any. The answer to that was easy: None.
Had he gone up, the chief would have seen that most of the Kurds have landed in a crazy-quilt fashion, almost as though a giant unseen hand had gathered them up and scattered them like pellets, some winding up by chance here, others there.
Many sleep in tents they brought with them or, if they were lucky enough, that they received from relatives living in nearby towns and villages in this predominantly Kurdish region of Turkey. Others huddle under wet blankets or sheets of plastic stretched across low-hanging tree branches.
Hollow-eyed women peer out from the tents, some with hacking coughs brought on by sleeping in subfreezing temperatures. Mud-crusted children look hungry and frightened - that curdling fear a child feels upon realizing that the parents are just as scared.
One little boy stared listlessly from his mother's arms, his head flopping to the side like a rag doll's.
Relief operations have been crippled by the terrain. The mountains may be beautiful, but they create logistical nightmares.
It has rained often and hard, and mud oozes down the paths, engulfing vehicles that try to bounce over it. One hairpin turn is so difficult that when trucks bog down there, as they often do, traffic stops dead.
Most trucks are forced to stop at a point two or three miles from the main group of refugees. There, supplies are transferred to heavy tractors that grind up the rest of the way.
But often they never make it with their loads intact. Refugees are so desperate for food and clean clothing that they clamber aboard the tractor beds, at times picking them clean. Several Kurds clawed each other Wednesday for shoes and cooking utensils, which they eagerly stuffed into bags or down the front of their jackets.
At the top, the distribution of remaining supplies is often chaotic. There are fights for crumbs, even when soldiers are around to try to impose order.
It is a terrain in which supply helicopters cannot land easily. There also seem to be problems with material arriving in the Western countries' airlifts. Several Kurds said soldiers and even their own clan leaders had told them to stay away from those bundles, although the reasons are unclear.
Some Kurds accuse Turkey of deliberately stalling in getting a workable relief system under way. It is because they are Kurds, they insist, and because the Turkish authorities have often repressed their own Kurdish population over the decades. In addition, local Kurds say that soldiers have blocked their efforts to bring in food and clothing on their own for their refugee brethren.
While some of those accusations may be products of frustration and panic, there is no question that basic structures like hospital tents are just now being set up.
And the soldiers are indeed rough, often screaming at the refugees in a language they do not understand and firing warning shots in the air to keep the Kurds from inching inland. Rifle fire reverberated across the mountain tops again and again on Wednesday.
But no matter how desperate their straits are here, the refugees insist they will not go back to their homes while President Saddam Hussein is in power. Death awaits them back in Iraq, they say.
It stalks them here as well, though, and those who survive are a tableau of misery.
They are people like Jamal Kuchur, who walked through the mountains with his brothers and their wives and children - 43 people in all - and who is still trying to figure out what hit him.
As did others, he blamed President Bush for encouraging an Iraqi rebellion against Saddam and then not actively supporting it.
"Is this your new world order?" he said to an American as he sat in the mud under a plastic sheet, looking out on a hard, cold rain that was turning to hail.
He was an urban planner in Dohuk, Kuchur said proudly, and an assistant lecturer at a local institute. He has relatives who are teachers and lawyers.
"Look at me now," he said.
by CNB